I wonder if I missed a memo.
Ubuntu isn’t really made for regular users, canonical doesn’t care about you, they’re in it for the server / enterprise money; they’ll regularly take decisions that go against your best interest like pushing snaps and adding ads to the terminal.
These days you don’t need .deb files with how ubiquitous flatpaks are becoming so there’s no real reason to stick to ubuntu anymore. If you like the ubuntu release model, fedora should be the closest alternative. It’s still sponsored by a corporation, but they have a loose hand over the distribution.
I agree that Ubuntu is a solid distro and would recommend it before Mint, it’s just not at the top of the list anymore. But if you’re happy with what you have, that’s all that matters.